13 June 2006

What would you get if you applied text analysis software and a mapping service to the classics in Project Gutenberg? You'd get something like Gutenkarte.

Gutenkarte is based on a location reference mapping service from MetaCarta. MetaCarta is able to analyse documents and extract location references. For each reference, they have an algorithm which tries to remove ambiguity and map that location accurately, based on the context of other geographic references in the text. Paris, Texas and Paris, France are no problem.

On Gutenkarte, they have taken several classic texts, mapped out all the action, and provided hyperlinks from each location reference to more background info such as Wikipedia articles.

The maps weight the location names by the number of references in the text. Some of the books they've analyzed are: